Bulgaria: A Paradise On Earth - Bulgaria's liberation from ottoman domination

Bulgaria's liberation from ottoman domination

In order to appreciate the role Russia played in this moment, which was so fateful to an entire people, it suffices to mention that no other country either then or later even planned to put pressure on the Porte to relieve the lot of the Bulgarians. Parallel to the mobilization called by Russia, the Bulgarian Central Charity Society (an organization of the Bulgarian national liberation movement) launched a campaign for rallying yolunteers, and 7500 Bulgarians responded to its appeal. With them the Russian Command formed the Bulgarian volunteer force under the command of General N. Stoletov. The Russian army crossed the Danube from Walachia at the end of June, 1877. Romanian troops fought in the war together with the Russians. For the next eight months the war followed a path of dramatic ups and downs. The Bulgarians assisted the Russian troops as scouts, guides and aides in the army supply and transport units. Some 50 chetas and armed peasant detachments disrupted the Turkish rear. After the bloody battle of the Bulgarian volunteers and the Russian troops near the southern Bulgarian town of Stara Zagora came the battles in the Shipka Pass of the Balkan Range. At Shipka at the end of August Russian troops and the Bulgarian volunteer force (some 6000 men) braved and resisted the onslaught of a 27,000-strong Turkish army. The town of Pleven - the greatest Turkish stronghold in Northern Bulgaria - Surrendered in late November 1877. Following this the Russians pressed to the south of the Balkan Range. At the battle of Sheinovo (Kazanluk district) 22,000 Turkish troops and officers surrendered with 83 cannon, after casualties amounting to thousands.

The Fight for Shipka

Thousand Russian servicemen and Romanians perished in the Bulgarian war of liberation, and tens of thousands Bulgarians lost their lives in the course of the military hostilities. Entire villages were razed to the ground and reduced to ashes by the Turkish troops. This shows the great extent to which the Porte ried to keep its hold on the Bulgarian lands, although in the long run it was forced to go into retreat.

From the multiple descriptions of this war here we shall quote but an excerpt from the Memoirs of George Washburne (a long-time Principal of Robert College in Constantinople, at which many Bulgarians received their education): Countless carts, crammed with Muslim exiles travelled along the road from Plovdiv to Istanbul. General Skobelev, the commander of the advance Russian troops, attempted to contact them and to assure them that they had nothing to fear, but they never stopped firing. The general commanded his troops to a stop to let the train of exile carts go on its way in peace. When they continued on their way, however, the Cossacks of General Skobelev came across Turkish infants and young children abandoned by their own parents by the roadside, as a cumbersome burden in their frantic flight. The Russian soldiers took the babies and children and later left them with the people of a roadside Turkish village.

The signing of the San Stefano peace treaty, Washburne goes on, 'brought great comfort both to the city and the College, although we had to give sympathy to the exhausted Turkish exiles from Bulgaria. It turned out that we had to feed and clothe those same people who two years before had mercilessly slaughtered the Bulgarians. Multitudinous crowds camped by the College and to this day continue to be our neighbours (Washburne wrote his Memoirs in 1907) relying on our compassion. Most of them bitterly repented the brutal acts they had perpetrated in Bulgaria and thought that their sufferings were but a judgement from on high. The majority of them were kindhearted people, though extremely ignorant. A certain number of them returned to Bulgaria.' The San Stefano peace treaty of 3.III.1878 turned all lands populated mostly by Bulgarians into an autonomous principality. The Great Powers, however, rescinded the treaty and imposed a new one, concocted in Berlin, under which a section of the liberated territory was returned to Turkey, and the rest was split into two: the principality of Bulgaria (the area around Sofia and the territory to the north of the Balkan Range) and Eastern Rumelia (the other part of Bulgaria lying to the south of the Balkan Range) which was made a Turkish tributary. Serbia, in addition, was given lands with purely Bulgarian population and was deprived of pure Serbian territory. Austria-Hungary was given formal rights over Dalmatia, occupied Bosnia, Herzegovina and the district of Novi Pazar, thus adding a total of 55,000 sq. km of new territory of Slav population. Great Britain, with the approval of the Porte, received the Island of Cyprus.

What was won in blood was dismembered in ink.The construction of the new Bulgarian state began with the help of the Provisional Russian Administration. The Russian occupation gave military training to the Bulgarians in the gymnastic societies, an unofficial but efficient way of rendering help towards the self-defence of the Bulgarian nationality in Southern Bulgaria. Owing to this, in 1885, seven years after the Treaty of Berlin, the Bulgarians united at their: own initiative the two parts of the country.
The young Bulgarian army heroically defended this act by repulsing the surprise aggression of King Milan.

Under the guidance of the Provisional Russian Administration all was done in the course of several post - war months to bring life back to normal. Reconstruction began, as did road and bridge construction, and the installment of a communications network. The Russians presented Bulgaria with several ships as a basis for her Danubean and Black Sea fleets. They also assisted the setting up of printing shops, publishing houses and newspapers in North and South Bulgaria (before the war the Turkish authorities had banned the setting up of printing shops on Bulgarian territory). The Constitution of the country was worked out also with the help of the Provisional Russian Administration. The Turnovo Constitution (effective from April 1879 to December 4, 1947) was the result of the victory of the Liberal Party over the Conservative Party at the Constituent Assembly at Veliko Turnovo. Thus Bulgaria became a democratic, constitutional monarchy. The monarchy was imposed upon the Bulgarian people by the Treaty of Berlin. The Bulgarian monarch, in close alliance with the big bourgeoisie, gradually extended his prerogatives until after World War II, when the monarchy was abolished after a national plebiscite in 1946. Prince Alexander Battenberg made the first somewhat timid attempts at this, while King Ferdinand I and King Boris III monopolized power to a great extent.

In its objective results the Russo - Turkish War led to a successful conclusion of the bourgeois-democratic revoltion in the new Bulgarian state, whose territory in 1885 covered 95,346 sq. km and whose population numbered about 3 million. Sofia was named the capital of the country by the Constituent Assembly in Turnovo. The physical terror and plundering of foreign domination had disappeared. The economic situation of the Bulgarians engaged in industrial and agricultural production could not, however, be said to have improved measurably. It soon became apparent that the land obtained through the agrarian reform was in most cases too small and insufficient to support a whole family by. The mass of poor people moved to the towns, while the land was bought up by the more wealthy. The crafts collapsed, unable to keep up with West European industrial competition and as a result of restrictive customs tariffs, which cut off the once widely accessible markets of the Balkans and Central Europe. The traditions of the Bulgarian Revival were still alive in the educated Bulgarians who, in the then-prevailing conditions, had no trouble finding employment in the new state apparatus or in educational or cultural work. These public - spirited Bulgarians generally stuck to the ideas of liberalism and had the broad support of the mass of small - time producers. This movement was represented by the Liberal Party, whose most outstanding representatives were P.R.Slaveikov, Petko Karavelov and Dragan Tsankov. In contrast to this the wealthy Bulgarians, the big merchants who had returned to Bulgaria from Constantinople or Bucharest, the new war-rich purveyors and speculators advanced the idea of granting limited rights to the people. The Conservative Party became their mouthpiece (D. Grekov, Todor Ikonomov and Konstantin Stoilov).

It was only by the end of the 19th century that the typical ways of the initial accumulation of capital.